Passing As Fluent

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YOU are the expert!

From: Russ Hicks
Date: 10/10/03
Time: 11:52:18 PM
Remote Name: 12.237.88.139

Comments

Hey Terry!

I just read your wonderful paper and all the discussions following it. Remarkable... Great job! Isn't this stuff fun?

You mentioned several times that you wish there was more literature on covert stuttering. Well congratulations my friend! You're writing it now!

Let me give you a little background here. I met both Sarah Watson and Chris Roach in 1999. And from them I began to get fascinated with covert stuttering - a totally different form of stuttering than my own OVERT stuttering. I contacted my friend Steve Hood, a wonderful and extremely brilliant SLP in Alabama, and asked him about Sarah and Chris. He was the one who introduced me to the concept of covert stuttering which he referred to as "interiorized" stuttering. (I don't know who originated the term "covert." Maybe it was Steve or me or gosh knows who.) The concept of interiorized stuttering has been around for many years and in studying more about that, I ran across the Iceberg Analogy of Stuttering introduced by Joe Sheehan in about 1970.

So I began to dig a little deeper into the iceberg analogy in order to understand more about covert stuttering. (I'd be honored if ou would read my paper on the Iceberg Analogy of Stuttering in this ISAD conference.) The more I understood about the iceberg, the more I understood about covert stuttering - and all other forms of stuttering including my own. The iceberg is simply a tool to help people visualize the entire stuttering problem, not just the tip sticking out of the water. In covert stuttering, the little tip is really only of minor consequence. It's the mammoth part below the waterline that's important!

I met Cathy Olish the following year in Chicago. As she, Sarah, Chris, Steve and I shared drinks together down at the bar (Sarah was only 16 so she was drinking a Coke, ha, ha!) we decided that it was high time the world learned about covert stuttering, and not let it languish in the backwaters of academia any longer. So we decided to do a workshop called "Covert Stuttering - EXPOSED!" the next year in Boston. And it was a smashing success. It was a totally new topic to 99% of the people there, but it drew a packed audience. And people began to come forward saying "Hey, I can really relate to that!"

Since that time, the concept of covert stuttering has darn near exploded in our faces! The conversations on Stutt-L have been amazing. Under Cathy's leadership we did the workshop again in 2002 in Anaheim and the room was totally packed. We even ran out of standing room and we had to turn people away! Covert stuttering has probably been the number 1 topic on Stutt-L this year, and Cathy and I formed the Covert-S group on Yahoo. People like you and Peter Reitzes and Patti Bohlman and Brad Madsen began coming out of the woodwork. I talked with Ellen Bennett, a wonderful SLP friend of mine, and she had been working with covert stutterers for years. Yeah, she knew about it. My jaw hit the floor and I said "Why is this such a secret?" and she said she didn't know - but no one had really talked about it very much. Amazing... It's covert, remember?

The upshot of all this is that, despite the casual mention of it in academic literature for the last decade or so, not much has been written or known about it - until NOW! And guess who the experts are? Check out the members of Covert-S! And that, my friend, includes YOU!

In several of my comments/questions on my iceberg paper, the questions has arisen from SLPs: What causes covert stuttering? How does it begin? How do I identify it in children? How do I treat it?

The answers are going to come from Stutt-L and Covert-S. I'm trying to get some good SLPs into Covert-S so you can teach them about covert stuttering. The more they understand it, the better they can treat it. Of course there are no easy answers. But it's a starting place. Virtually the ONLY starting place.

You're the right man in the right place at the right time. And you're a teacher. So teach. We'll all work together and lift ourselves up by our bootstraps. Right now, NO ONE is an expert at it, but together we can pool our knowledge and advice and make sure that today's students are a LOT more knowledgeable of covert stuttering than people are now.

We've got a heck of a job ahead of us. But together we can make a difference in LOTS of lives.

I'm betting you're up for your next challenge...! <smile>

See you on Stutt-L and Covert-S!

Russ


Last changed: September 12, 2005